The Omnipotent, Omniscient & Ubiquitous Google Continues To Up The Ante

'To Google'
has become the universal generic term, meaning "to search." In the last 70 days there has been 38 new products added to the Search King's arsenal of tools. Even with
Bing's 100 million advertising campaign, nothing seems to be able to
impede the Google machine or crack a chink in its fortified armor.
Today, with approximately 70 percent domination of the global search
market, the omnipotent, omniscient, omnivorous and ubiquitous Google
keeps upping the ante to stay on top of the search engine game. And
here is why...

Marissa Mayer, VP GoogleWhen Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search products and user experience was asked what the next iteration of an intelligent Google would look like, she said, "intuitive search." She wants Google to be capable of presenting information to users before they even know what they're looking for. Amazingly she doesn’t think her team are that far away from achieving what she calls the ‘omnivorous’ search engine – that is, one which is able to take a user’s total context – where they are, what they were just reading, which direction their mobile phone is pointed and so on.

So hats off to Mayer for dreaming big. If her past accomplishments are any indication that she will reach her "intuitive search goal," just take a look at what she was able to accomplish in the short term. Here is a list of products launched by Google in the last three months.

Google URL Shortener(12/14) -- Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are: * Stability – ensuring that the service has very good up-time * Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages * Speed – fast resolution of short URLsGoogle URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

Google Real-Time Search(12/7) -- Google's real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day with the feeds from Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — and of course, Twitter.

Living Stories(12/8) --provides a new, experimental way to consume news, developed by a partnership between Google, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In Living Stories, you can read the same reporting and analysis that you expect from the Times and the Post, delivered on a highly interactive platform.

Google GogglesGoogle Goggles(12/7)-– an Android mobile tool which enables people to search using pictures instead of words. Users focus their phone's camera on an object, and Google compares elements of that picture against its database of images. When it finds a match, Google will tell you the name of what you're looking at, and provide a list of results linking through to the relevant web pages and news stories.

Google Checkout Store Gadget (12/3) -- A Google Gadget that lets you set up a store in minutes by filling out a Google Docs spreadsheet and dropping a gadget in Sites, Blogger, iGoogle, or your own web site.

(11/15) -- Google Image Swirl organizes image search results based on their visual and semantic similarity and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface.

Script Converter (11/03) -- Converts text and web pages written in one script to its phonetic equivalent in another script.

s(11/02) -- A tool to help webmasters increase page views on their sites.Given a page on your Web site, Related Links can choose the most related pages from your site and show them in a gadget. You can embed this gadget in your page to help your users reach other pages easily. Related Links also suggests searches that users can run within your site to find even more related pages

Google Social Search (10/24) -- All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. What they've done is surface that content together in one single place to make your results more relevant. They accomplish this by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you're following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specific to you, so you need to be signed in to your Google Account to use Social Search.

Fetch as GooglebotGoogle Fetch as Googlebot(10/15) -- This bot lets you send Googlebot to retrieve a page from your Web site.This feature will help users a great deal when they re-implement their site with a new technology stack, find out that some of their pages have been hacked, or want to understand why they're not ranking for specific keywords.

Quite a list, wouldn't you say? I counted 268 in total. If you think I've missed one, by all means, please leave a comment and list the URL. Would like to see if we can make this list as comprehensive as possible. Hope it is an assist to all the readers of this blog.

So if you never thought of Google as omnipotent, omniscient, or ubiquitous, just keep watching the success rate (or lack thereof ) of Bing. When I last researched, "the little engine that could" looks liked their millions in advertising were essentially being poured down the drain. Its share of search result pages (SERPs) have actually showed a decline versus a gain in the last couple of months. On December 9, Experian® Hitwise® announced that Google accounted for 71.57 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Nov. 28, 2009. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 15.39 percent, 9.34 percent and 2.65 percent, respectively. The remaining 52 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.07 percent of U.S. searches.Hitwise Chart-So, it appears that Google's ever-growing toolbox of products will continue to perserve its reputation of being omnipotent, omniscient and ubiquitous. And if Marissa Mayer has her way - some day very soon - it may even add "intuitive" and "omnivorous" to that prestigious list of qualifiers!